Beavis And Butt Head

Beavis and Butt-head, MTV's famous monosyllabic cartoon duo, are about to make their Latin American debut.Next month, MTV Latino will begin showing the hit half-hour show.Unlike many other programs, the show will run in English, with Spanish subtitles. According to MTV Latino research, Latin kids prefer it that way."We asked them specifically if they prefered to get "Beavis and Butt-head" dubbed or with subtitles, and overwhelmingly they said subtitles," says MTV Latino spokesman Nelson Benedico.

Uhhh, Beavis? What, Butt-head? Like, we're on a DVD. That's cool. For the first time, an extensive collection of Beavis and Butt-head animated shorts has been released on DVD, showing TV's stupidest teenagers to be even stupider than we remember. They get tattooed by an escaped serial killer. They set cats on fire. They cut down trees they're supposed to prune. Beavis and Butt-head were the poster boys for the degradation of American culture in the 1990s, but the genius of the show, one of the highest rated to run on MTV, was that it made fun of the very people who made it a hit. The show mocked the disaffected teenagers who did nothing more with their lives than watch television.

They're moronic. They're destructive. And they star in one of the hottest shows on television.They're Beavis and Butt-head, the cartoon characters featured in the highest-rated series on the MTV music video cable channel. Recently they popped up on the cover of Newsweek. And talk-show host David Letterman, that paragon of hipness, has taken to quoting the boys' trademark utterance: Huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh. Cool.The characters' popularity may mystify some folks. After all, B&B pass time by setting fires, sniffing gas fumes and making lewd comments while watching videos.

AUSTIN, Texas - Don Hertzfeldt, the young, amiable and highly praised director of a series of animated shorts featuring stick-figures, is vexed by the prospects of hand-drawn animation, especially the general studio response to the form. "I really get frustrated with the studios because so many people just can't get past the word `animation,'" Hertzfeldt said here last week. "It's all visuals, like what kind of software are you using for the shirt textures? Writing, characters, editing is all secondary for them."

Dumb means cool when it comes to Mike Judge's "Beavis and Butt-head."When you meet Judge, you can't help but think that this is what his cartoon creations will look like if they ever grow up.Judge, who writes, draws and does the voices for both teen-age masters of the vulgar, is balding, sallow and a solemn eye-averter.But he's obviously smarter than his characters, who have hit it big with their own MTV show as they assault every adult institution with gross-out humor and half-witted chortling.

In her previous cartoon hometown of Highland, Daria Morgendorffer was forced to share a classroom with MTV's nacho-munching, TV-worshiping, generally anti-social Beavis and Butt-head. The duh duo would often serenade her to the tune of "diarrhea, cha-cha-cha."No wonder she's so cynical."They had a poor schooling system," says Glenn Eichler, co-creative supervisor of MTV's first full-length cartoon, "Daria." Now in its second season, it's one of MTV's highest-rated shows.Daria, a character audiences got to know from sarcastic asides aimed at Beavis and Butt-head, is now the primary character, getting ample chances to demonstrate her droll demeanor.

I probably took the news better than most. Then again, most of those worshipping at the altar of "Beavis & Butt-head" are pre-pubescent boys. Like their heroes, they are probably utterly oblivious that anything has happened.But it's true. Come October, after 220 episodes, "Beavis & Butt-head" will be no more, the MTV network announced this week. Another American icon bites the dust, and I'm a little sad.Like a lot of MTV programming, "B&B" was geared toward males ages 12 to 18, not strong, intelligent feminist women like myself.

MTV has moved its early evening showings of "Beavis and Butt-head" to a 10:30 p.m. time slot where young children presumably will not be watching.It's a move to which Beavis and Butt-head might respond with their trademark "Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Cool," since many youngsters stay up late anyway or know how to program their VCRs better than their parents do. The MTV move took effect last night.The cult cartoon series came under fire during the past two weeks, after an Ohio mother blamed Beavis and Butt-head's pyrotechnic hi-jinks (lighting fires and firecrackers)

Can watching MTV's "Beavis and Butt-head" really lead a 5-year-old boy to set his family's mobile home on fire?Can seeing a film, which shows actors as schoolboy athletes testing their mettle by lying in the middle of a highway as cars whiz past, actually lead teen-agers to try it for real?The questions are part of a growing concern over the connection between popular culture and real-life behavior by young people. And there's an urgency to the asking of them in the wake of the violent deaths of a child and a teen-ager, which parents of the victims have attributed to TV and film.

Greenwich, Connecticut. -- For me, the good news/bad news ambivalence is running high these days. It all has to do with parental confusion, an Ivy League school and one of the most troubling programs ever to come on the tube.Newsweek has a lot to do with this, specifically the magazine's October 11 edition with the cover that shows David Letterman beside a headline ''Stupid TV Tricks/The Billion-Dollar Battle to Insult Your Intelligence.'' Dave shares the cover with two cartoon characters who star in an MTV show named after them, ''Beavis and Butt-head.

In her previous cartoon hometown of Highland, Daria Morgendorffer was forced to share a classroom with MTV's nacho-munching, TV-worshiping, generally anti-social Beavis and Butt-head. The duh duo would often serenade her to the tune of "diarrhea, cha-cha-cha."No wonder she's so cynical."They had a poor schooling system," says Glenn Eichler, co-creative supervisor of MTV's first full-length cartoon, "Daria." Now in its second season, it's one of MTV's highest-rated shows.Daria, a character audiences got to know from sarcastic asides aimed at Beavis and Butt-head, is now the primary character, getting ample chances to demonstrate her droll demeanor.

There are milestones and then there are milestones in popular culture.Five years after the debut of two of our most controversial and cretinous television characters on MTV, the end arrives tonight for "Beavis and Butt-head."The finale -- titled "Beavis and Butt-head Are Dead" -- might not give you quite the same sense of loss as the last episode of "Cheers" or "M*A*S*H," but the crudely drawn cartoon about two repulsive teen-age boys with particularly annoying laughs is nevertheless landmark television in its own way.Many believe its popularity was telling us something about ourselves in the 1990s or, at least, something about male adolescence.

I probably took the news better than most. Then again, most of those worshipping at the altar of "Beavis & Butt-head" are pre-pubescent boys. Like their heroes, they are probably utterly oblivious that anything has happened.But it's true. Come October, after 220 episodes, "Beavis & Butt-head" will be no more, the MTV network announced this week. Another American icon bites the dust, and I'm a little sad.Like a lot of MTV programming, "B&B" was geared toward males ages 12 to 18, not strong, intelligent feminist women like myself.

It would not be a stretch to suggest that Beavis and Butt-head would be better candidates than Bud Selig for the position of permanent baseball commissioner.They're currently popular, something Selig cannot say. They've demonstrated an ability to generate tens of millions of dollars (their movie made more money in its first weekend than the Milwaukee Brewers' payroll for the 1997 season). And ol' Beavis and Butt-head are big with the coveted under-25 set.But there's bound to be a Beavis and Butt-head sequel, making them unavailable, and unless the powers of the commissioner are altered, it won't really matter if Selig or Jerry Reinsdorf or Donald Fehr holds the job.About the only real power the commissioner is afforded now is ceremonial.

Dumb means cool when it comes to Mike Judge's "Beavis and Butt-head."When you meet Judge, you can't help but think that this is what his cartoon creations will look like if they ever grow up.Judge, who writes, draws and does the voices for both teen-age masters of the vulgar, is balding, sallow and a solemn eye-averter.But he's obviously smarter than his characters, who have hit it big with their own MTV show as they assault every adult institution with gross-out humor and half-witted chortling.

In "Beavis and Butt-head Do America," America survives -- but just barely.The movie, like the MTV show that spawned it, is crude, ugly, sexist, nihilistic, ugly, stupid, also very ugly, and funny as all get // out. Beavis and Butt-head rule!They are a curious pair, not really a product of animation (which is purposely abysmal) but of attitude. As an alleged grown-up, I get them completely mixed up, but I don't think it matters. They appear to be teen-age metalheads, brothers possibly, devoteesof AC/DC and Metallica; they wear short pants; they have pimples, braces, gummy smiles, narrow heads; and they don't talk so much as gurgle some kind of droogspeak only marginally decipherable.

If controversy really does sell CDs, now is the time to be in th record business. Three of the most notorious acts in popular music are unleashing new albums today: Rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, the Dr. Dre cohort currently under indictment for murder; Beavis and Butt-head, the animated MTV twosome whose show has been blamed for everything from arson to the decline of Western Civilization; and Guns N' Roses, the riot-inciting hard rock act whose name has become...

There are milestones and then there are milestones in popular culture.Five years after the debut of two of our most controversial and cretinous television characters on MTV, the end arrives tonight for "Beavis and Butt-head."The finale -- titled "Beavis and Butt-head Are Dead" -- might not give you quite the same sense of loss as the last episode of "Cheers" or "M*A*S*H," but the crudely drawn cartoon about two repulsive teen-age boys with particularly annoying laughs is nevertheless landmark television in its own way.Many believe its popularity was telling us something about ourselves in the 1990s or, at least, something about male adolescence.

The newest MTV series, "Buzzkill," is prefaced by a viewer advisory, like the same network's "Beavis and Butt-head." The conspiratorial and playful tone is the same; only the words are different."

I GUESS MY father was always dumb. But in the decades when he was at his dumbest, the 1970s and 1980s, a high premium was not placed on random acts of stupidity. So whenever he behaved in a way that seemed somehow less than intelligent -- like the time he put a pile of forks in the microwave saying, "I just have to know" -- there were no critics there to call it art.Like lots of dumb people, my dad was born too early. His stupidity was something done in private, something only the family could enjoy.